I need to slowly heat a custom tool so I've been staggering heat commands

This is why PID annoys me so, PID tunes are best at their tune temperature. The further away from the tune temperature you put your set point, the worse it behaves. Sometimes I fed the controller a custom tune in the setup g code for doing the weird stuff that’s well outside my usual range. Setting a reduced PWM max probably helps a lot too.

@Jeff_DeMaagd PID is simply a bad control scheme when the process gain (in this case heater power divided by tool heat capacity) is large relative to the sensing delay.